Extreme disappointment

Rating: 3/10 (8 August 2008)

I have just come back from visiting the D-Day beaches, museums, memorials and cemeteries for the second time in 4 years. This time with my wife. I find the subject fascinating.
I saw this movie a very long time ago, I must have been a kid. I have just seen it with my wife, hoping to help her put some order in all the things she has seen in Normandy.
I was sadly shocked to see such poor acting and above all, extremely terrible directing for the English and American scenes and "just" bad directing for the German ones.
Other films from the same period and older portray battle scenes and the soldier soul with far superior credibility.
I can imagine the directors telling the poor actors "look towards the horizon with dignified face" and other rubbish of that sort. No attention to logic, coherent acting or historical research. This resulted in empty, soulless characters.
It was really hard not to turn the film off. The stupid comical acting in the middle of a battle made my whole body cringe. Why did they need to invent things like paratrooper John Steele hanging for 10 hours and being deafened by the church bells? That is not true and looked stupid! He was shot in the foot BEFORE landing, he was hanging there for ONLY 2 hours until taken prisoner by the Germans to be liberated by the 82nd and 101st Airborne. And he was not deaf for hours or days, he even said that the tension and the pain in his foot did not allow him to hear the bells. In the town of Sainte-Mère-Église you can read all about this. Do not rely on the internet because sadly it mostly considers the scenes on the film as historical facts.
And why did the actor play him as if he was a silly clown? I guess the directors thought that they needed some comedy in the movie in order to keep people entertained.
If they paid 1/4 million $ in 1962! to John Wayne to appear and ruin the movie, they could have used a small fraction of that sum on historical research or a proper director.
A positive note is that the Germans spoke German amongst themselves, and not English with German accent, which sounds imbecilic. The same applies to the other languages, although they are all very stereotyped.
Quoting freely from "To Be or Not to Be" (1942) what this movie has done to Cornelius Ryan's book is what the Germans did to Poland.